With the rapid growth of the telecommunication industry, operators try to offer customers consistent high speed quality service while dealing with increased traffic demands. Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks can be subject to downgraded services, such as load imbalances between nodes and low quality of service related to handover delays, due to increased network demands as more subscribers are joining the network. In addition, these network issues may be the result of poor network topology planning and operators taking shortcuts at deployment.
In order to alleviate these issues, a first step in network planning and optimization can be to develop a re-homing plan. Generally, re-homing is a redistribution and reconfiguration process for traffic and routing in the radio domain by moving a cell site from a Radio Network Controller (RNC) with a heavy load to one with a lower load. The objective is to reconfigure the network elements in a geographic area to better load balance the network due to traffic growth and migration to achieve the optimization of routings, loading and throughput for the radio access network.
Currently these re-homing operations are performed on the fly and based on common sense, without any mathematical or automated approach. The cell site re-homing procedure for radio access networks requires many manual operation steps, so it is a labor intensive and time-consuming task requiring reconfigurations of both the radio and transport networks. This approach can lead to only a short term fix or a local optimization, given the exponential theoretical possibilities of performing the re-homes in a real-size LTE network. Any changes in routing, loading and throughput resulting from the re-homing at the radio side will undoubtedly impact the performance of core network as well. Determining an optimal re-homing plan while satisfying the various network constraints and objectives can be a challenging process.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method that obviate or mitigate the above described problems.